Nelson Augustus Moore

Nelson Augustus Moore (1824-1902) was a painter and photographer born in Kensington, Connecticut.  About 1846, he wrote to Asher B. Durand, a founder of The Hudson River School of painting, seeking advice on becoming an artist. Durand recommended that Moore move to New York to study drawing under Thomas S. Cummings (1804-1894) and painting under Daniel Huntington (1816-1906), President of the National Academy of Design. In 1850, Moore returned to Kensington and began his career as a painter doing local landscapes. He married and had four children, two of whom became painters: his son Edwin Augustus Moore (1858-1926) was a figure painter and his daughter Ellen Maria (1861-1934) practiced as a miniaturist.

Moore was entrepreneurial as an artist and early on saw the commercial potential of the new technology of photography, only recently invented in 1839.   In 1854, together with his brother Roswell, Nelson opened Connecticut’s first professional daguerreotype studio in New Britain.  The Moores tried to address the early limitations of the photographic process in capturing events by taking their equipment on location to significant sites and events. In 1855, Moore documented the dying but historic Charter Oak tree and then returned to record the fallen tree after a storm brought it down on August 21, 1856. Moore continued to paint, concentrating on Connecticut landscapes.  Moore died in his hometown, Berlin Connecticut, in November of 1902.